Abstract

Friday, February 5, 2016

Death Cafes

Are
Americans less likely to talk about their mortality than people in other
countries? A search I did earlier this week—“Do Americans tend not to talk
about death and dying?”—brought up the following articles:

·“Why Are Americans Scared to Talk
About Dying?,” published on the website of National
Journal on Feb. 1.

·The website of “Life in the USA,” an
organization created to help immigrants better understand American culture,
states: “Where many other cultures view death as a natural progression in the cycle of
life among generations, the American culture prefers not to talk about death.
When death does approach or arrive, as it inevitably must, Americans often use
euphemisms: ‘passed on,’ ‘passed away,’ or even just ‘passed’ are all in
current use.”

·On the website of Vox, under a gorgeous image of sunlight
illuminating a graveyard, the subject is “How Americans’ refusal to talk about
death hurts the elderly.”

But Americans’ willingness to speak frankly about their
mortality has been on the rise for many decades, beginning with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s
landmark book On Death and Dying in
1969. And one recent manifestation of this trend is the rise of Death Cafes,
venues for talking about the fine points of death and dying, typically
accompanied with caffeinated beverages and sweets.

I heard the term for the first time a couple of weeks ago,
when Paula brought home from the Somerville Library a bright-blue flyer with
the words Death Cafe prominently displayed in a jaunty
font. It took me a fraction of a second to confirm that it did not refer to
“Death Cab,” the shortened name of one of my favorite bands. But the script served
its purpose. This would not be a somber experience. Paula and I were curious.

The first thing that struck me—other than that it was well
attended, with seventeen people spread among two groups—was that there were
several young people on hand. One of them mentioned that he recently lost a
friend to opiate abuse. A pair of youthful sisters spoke articulately, and
sometimes quibbled, about elder care and end-of-life policies. One expressed a
desire to someday own a beautiful necklace with a decoration for holding her
parents’ ashes. Paula noted that she’d always assumed that I would outlive her,
an expectation that was turned upside down by my diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. She also
mentioned the loss of a beloved grandmother who died suddenly when she was a
teenager. A woman with a terminal condition spoke matter-of-factly about the
terms of her dying.

Others spoke about the extent to which family members
should be bound to the deceased’s wishes. If a person planned to be cremated,
what would become of the ashes? Keep the urn in a closet? Display it
prominently? Bury the urn and ashes in a family cemetery plot? Scatter the
ashes in the wind, over a favorite lake or bay? Would doing so go against
health and environmental regulations?

One topic concerned social media. Should survivors of the
deceased shut down the person’s Facebook site, making clear that a presence on Facebook
did not connote immortality? Or transform it into a virtual shrine, with
comments and “likes” helping to show that the person has not been forgotten?

Not surprisingly, most venues dedicated to Death Cafes are
in affluent nations, North America and Western Europe in particular. All six
habitable continents are home to the phenomenon, although southeastern Europe
and Russia, perhaps having more pressing matters to worry about, appear to be largely
indifferent to the concept. And the only Death Cafe in the Middle East or North
Africa is in Jerusalem.

The session that Paula and I attended took place at the
Somerville Central Library and was facilitated by Glenn Ferdman, the library director,
and Janine Lotti, who is the city’s Council on Aging’s senior project manager.

Ferdman, who became acquainted with the Death Cafe concept
while working in the Kansas City area, handed out a “Death and Dying” bibliography
that includes titles such as Being
Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande; Things I’ve Learned From Dying: A Book About
Life,by David R. Dow; and The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch, written
by the celebrated computer scientist who died in 2008 from pancreatic cancer at
age forty-seven.

4 comments:

I remember my dear, practical grandmother trying to talk about disbursing her things after she'd died with my father and mother at dinner out one night. I thought, "oh my god, are we actually going to talk about something real?" I think my parents shut it down pretty quickly. I want to be more like my grandmother. Hey, the lifeboat cruise is purely a rental.